This is a question for users of TTG Highslide Gallery and TTG Highslide Gallery Pro. The “shared resources” feature was an experimental idea built into the gallery. At this point, I’m wondering whether anyone actually uses it. Would anyone miss it if it were gone?
The argument against future inclusion of the feature has several points:
1) It’s a pain in the bum to keep up with from update-to-update.
2) It’s not at all intuitive, and I think just confuses people.
3) It creates a number of additional conditional process for Lightroom to grind through, and may or may not have an impact on the speed of the gallery.
I have no plans to include this feature in any future products; it’s too much hassle amounting to too little a reward. It lives and dies with the Highslide gallery, whatever the response to this post. I would really like to “clean up” the next release of the gallery by removing the feature, but I don’t want to disappoint anyone who may have found it useful. So, I’m looking for you all to sound off on the feature. What do you think? Useful? Extraneous? Indifferent?
Thanks,
Matt
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
The idea is very good, to have a common place for all resources. But the thing is that if you enable the box you don’t see the design any more (at least in Windows, have not tried in Mac) and it is as you said confusing with this behaivour.
I do like it and would enable it if the behaivour would be more “normal”, the benifits is that if you manually tweek or add a special contents out side the TTG, you have to only update once. The other benifits is less files at server.
Matthew, you know I long for one place to change the look of all my galleries. I keep on changing my look and it would be so nice to avoid all these ugly old galleries, I never find the tme to update.
I do understand there are other complications involved – with a common place for all ressources you lose the hand-on feeling.
Hi Matt
Thanks, but I have not yet used this feature.
I agree with those down sides and that there are some benefits. I *was* planning on using it, but considering I am probably going to write a server-side wrapper for including Highslide Pro galleries in my existing website I can simply include a extra line or two in the code to redirect to a shared location and manage it outside of Lightroom.
If anything (and granted it doesn’t sound like the Lightroom SDK makes this easy or even possible) is the ability to export just the core guts of the galleries (minus the html, body, and other page related tags) so it can be easily dropped into an existing website without having to strip all that out manually or via server-side code.
So… I would agree that the work probably outweighs the benefits at this point… unless you can take it to the next level as mentioned above
To be honest, i wasn’t quite sure what it was supposed to be used for (might help if I read the instructions on your site). Mind you, I’m still not exploiting all of the capabilities of this web gallery yet, either. Options for improved functionality are always welcome, but if they interfere too much with more global improvement, then perhaps they should be reconsidered!
Sorry if that wasn’t much help!
I don’t use it, so wouldn’t miss it if you didn’t include it in future updates.